G'day all from the Land Down Under,

I passed the V6 exam yesterday!

I think the next step will be the OSCP

Congrats!  I think you'll enjoy OSCP.  I know a few who've been through it, and it's on my list of things to do this year, as well.

Thanks guys.

Congrats

Thanks again everyone for the warm welcome.

For preparing for the exam, I used the official CEH prep guide as well as some custom quizzes I made using Quiz Master. I also used some example quizzes from Preplogic. My wife and kids (6 of them) also helped out with questions. On some of the topics I knew I was struggling with (I am a programmer not a networker), I would read the topic then write a series of questions. If the kids wanted me to do something for them, they had to ask a question off the question list.

My motivation for doing the CEH is difficult to answer. I became interested in computer security in the early 1990's after watching a news item about two Australian crackers (Electron and Phoenix). In 1995, I became a programmer and was voted the most dangerous person in my class (something to do with virus analysis). Then I started reverse engineering for the mental challenge. It always astounded me that (usually) one single byte in a binary file was the only thing protecting the software. Even software that required a hardware dongle!

While working as a programmer, I was always more interested in the latest exploits etc than writing code. Then last year I heard about the CEH course and decided a career change was in order.

I chose to do the CEH course in class. The only thing I can say about the class is that 5 days was not enough time. In a sense, I was lucky because I have been using *nix since 1995. Some of the networking guys struggled with using Linux during class time. I would strongly recommend that anyone taking the CEH that does not have a basic understanding of Linux installs Linux into a virtual machine and at least learn basic commands.

I have chosen to do the OSCP because I learn much more by doing. From what I understand, the OSCP qualification is highly respected as well. The CEH course was great, but there was a huge amount of theory, some of which was difficult to understand coming from a non-networking background. My only regret is that I didn't do the CEH much sooner.

I hope that I have provided some insight into my motivations etc.

@don: Australia truly is a beautiful country